One of the latest pieces of conversation around the Twittersphere and blogosphere has been the acquisition of online footwear (, etc.) merchant Zappos by online behemoth Amazon.com. Zappos, known for their unique culture and unrelenting devotion to their customers, has understandably faced a pile of scrutiny and doubt over the future of the Zappos way of business. Even if Zappos remains an independently-run entity from Amazon, how could they possibly maintain the culture they’ve worked so hard to achieve?

Instead, I’d like to propose a different theory. Amazon’s already attempted to venture into the world of customer-focused service – in the shoe business, no less – with their own Endless.com. Although Amazon’s customer service reputation has generally improved as the company matures, they don’t hold a candle (or throw a shoe at, if you will) the CS credibility held by Zappos.  What if Amazon intends to use Zappos as a model for a new, company-wide customer service philosophy?

What do you think? Could Amazon pull off the Zappos culture? Is that business philosophy even feasible in a company of Amazon’s diversity and size? How could they make that happen (and make it work)?

The home page over at Bing.com – Microsoft’s newest generation of search – is a huge step forward from past offerings. The page is simple, inviting, and seems to have a better pulse of the current trends on the Web.

It surprised me that Microsoft chose to include a seemingly random image as the background of the page. The image changes daily and includes several hover spots, each of which reveals a fact related to the picture and a link to a suggested relevant search query. Two of these links are duplicated in the footer bar of the page.

It seems to me that the background image of Bing is a huge missed opportunity for Microsoft. Although its designers chose to include popular searches on the home page and even may include posts from Twitter in search results, Bing’s random home page image stops its realtime cred in its tracks.

Instead, Bing should include a background image that is relevant to the news of the day (or at least a relevant holiday). With the amount of media available on the Web, this shouldn’t be a huge task; maybe they could scan the Wikipedia page for the current day to find a relevant event. (Today’s pic could be an archived shot of Endeavour or an early concert image of the Rolling Stones in commemoration of their first show together). I’d give them huge bonus points if they chose a Creative Commons image each day; I hear now they’re even easier to find.

Remember viral campaigns? A year or two ago, viral media – videos, sites, or entire campaigns that were so quirky or shocking that friends forwarded them through networks in a viral fashion – was the Holy Grail of the tech marketing world. Now that the viral world has gone mainstream (with some marketing firms even “guaranteeing” a viral smash), the search is on for the next Grail on the web.

Now we’ve found it: the trending topics list on Twitter. Nestled among breaking news topics are a spectrum of memes, games started by celebrity Twitterers, and – you guessed it – ads in the form of giveaways. The most recent participant in the race of trending visibility is an ancient content management company that is giving away free MacBooks to random Twitter users that choose to retweet their company’s hashtag… and they’re putting Twitter’s paid sponsors to shame. TechCrunch reports that the latest stunt is using 2.5% of all Twitter traffic.

Twitter trending is the next wave of guerilla brand promotion online, but its lifetime is sure to be short-lived. If other companies hop on the trending bandwagon, there’s likely to be a competition for the limited space on the trending list; that means that there could be more promotions for bigger prizes down the road. But if the 2.5% spirals up with a flurry of new promotions, Twitter users are bound to tire of seeing sanctioned ads for random companies in the streams of the users they follow.

Where’s the tipping point between entering yourself in a hashtag promotion and becoming a burden for spamming a stream?

This is a story about connections.

When iTunes first added podcast support way back in 2005, C.C. Chapman’s Accident Hash was one of the first shows I browsed. Each episode features a few songs; almost all of them are written and performed by independent musicians. Over the years I’ve been exposed to hundreds of great bands on the Hash and on other podcasts, and it’s really ignited my love of independent music.

To be honest, though, discovered songs and artists from podcasts were mostly just a form of entertainment while driving or working while my music collection played on my iMac or iPod touch… that is, until yesterday. I’d just woken up and was processing the email I’d received overnight. Among the messages was a newsletter from Eventful, a great local events site. Normally I’d just skim the event listings and delete the message; I stay subscribed on the off chance that I’d recognize an act coming to the area.

Sure enough, one of the names on the list sounded familiar; Rebecca Loebe was going to be playing that night at my alma mater, the University of Maine.  I did a quick search and found that, yes, I’d heard recorded performances of Rebecca’s “Grace” and other songs on none other than Accident Hash. I decided I’d take the short drive up to Orono to watch her perform in person. I’d always loved her sweet voice and somewhat quirky (in a good way) yet charming songs.

By sheer coincidence, my normal Tuesday night routine includes watching a live, weekly online concert by Matthew Ebel, another artist played often on the Hash. I brought my PowerBook with me to Orono and ate dinner while watching Matt’s video stream and chat room. I mentioned in the chat that I was watching Rebecca set up, and Matthew revealed that he had played just after Rebecca at a show at the Lizard Lounge in Boston two weeks earlier.

The show itself was great. Rebecca and her tour partner Jenn Grinels were both amazing. After the show I spoke for a bit with Rebecca, told her about how I discovered her music, and said hello to her from Matthew. I also bought a CD from each of the artists, and they’re both on heavy rotation now.

Online connections never cease to amaze me. In a single day, I’d listened to two wonderful, independent musicians from Atlanta (Rebecca) and Boston (Matthew). I’d never heard Rebecca’s music on the radio, and she had only played in Maine one other time before last night. The ways to find and connect with fans keep growing and changing every day… and every once in a while, your day ends with a really great performance and really great music.

You should buy Rebecca’s music. It’s good stuff. She’s also @rebeccaloebe on Twitter. Matthew is @matthewebel. His music is also great, and you can buy it here. While you’re at it, buy some Jenn Grinels music. All three of them are 5-star artists. Rebecca also has a ton of shows coming up – go check if she’s heading your way!

On every summer trip I take to Boston, I always try to make some time to walk around Quincy Market. On a clear day several street performers will be stationed at various spots around the historic market demonstrating a talent or performing some sort of act. Some attract a few tourists as they walk past. The seasoned performers can build a crowd of hundreds within a few minutes.

I’ve been thinking a lot about these street performers lately and how an online crowd can build just as quickly. Like the audiences gathering outside Quincy Market, these online crowds often share an interest or purpose. Most of the people in the crowd have never met – and most will never see each other again.

This morning, one such crowd of people across the globe formed around a common event: a temporary glitch in Google’s search results pages. Hundreds of Twitter users reported their experience in an effort to determine the scope of the problem.

And while it’s widely known that famous Twitterers can garner follower crowds of thousands on the microblogging site, there was no better example of the speed of crowd formation than when Soleil Moon Frye, an actress best known for the title role in the TV series Punky Brewster, began to tweet. Within 24 hours of her first tweet, more than 3,000 people were following her account.

Twitter may be considered an for digital street performers. As we continue to see, online crowds hold much more power to engage with those stationed outside the online Quincy Market.

Photo by Ecnerwal.

The greatest failure of technology is that it is often not used to its full potential.  And, as I tweeted a short while ago:

Every piece of political news that appears makes me a stronger believer of that statement.

A while ago a post entitled “Solve Some Real World Problems” popped up in Google Reader from Chris Brogan. It’s no surprise, really, that the politics of politics could easily be considered one of the problems technology could help to solve. Numerous startups have tried. None have really caught on, though (at least as far as I’m aware)… why?

The need for a new system

I’ve started to think about what it is I don’t enjoy about politics and how it is presented and discussed online.  There are actually several factors I feel are missing from the current dialogue when looking at a specific post from a commenter or forum user:

• Accountability. A majority of posts are written anonymously or under a pseudonym. Who is this person? Are they liberal or conservative? Where do they stand on issues?
• History. At the same time, it’s important to know what the person has said in the past. What has this person said in the past? What is the scope of his/her contributions to the discussion?
• Reference. Many posts cite speeches or past candidate views. Where can I read where the points within the post were originally raised?
• Freedom. Often comments are based solely on the fact that they involve their favorite candidate. Do you support a candidate but not agree with one of his or her views? (*gasp*)

The style of discussion is also important.  This also lends itself to many options:

• A free-form discussion forum
• A discussion forum based off of broad topics (a speech, an issue, etc.)
• A discussion forum based off of external news articles or URLs (digg-style)

I would probably argue for the third option in this case.

From all of this, I feel a successful forum for political discussion would need a few features:

• A login system with required registration (name, location, political affiliation, and supported candidate(s))
• Some sort of comment rating and user karma system
• A user post history
• A (very) easy way to cite external sources
• Invitation-only… at least to start

Does Digg or Reddit already cover these bases? Yes, to an extent. But I believe the political discussion is so unique that it needs its own specialized arena.

What do you think?

I would love to hear what you think about this. What do you believe is missing in the current online political discussion? How could it be changed into a more effective and productive conversation? Do you agree with what I’ve said… or what have I left out? Is there a site that already does this well?

If you’re a new reader to ANW, welcome. Don’t be afraid to comment! I’d also love to hear from people with all sorts of political affiliations: liberal, conservative, and anything in between. Thanks for participating.

Web service developers today have a relatively easy job to do if they so choose. Don’t want to spend a lot of time doing statistics for your site? Use Google Analytics. Need event listings or reviews? Pull them from an API. Storage space or bandwidth concerns? There’s Amazon Web Services for that.

One of the key tenets of the connected and shared Web world of today is to let best-in-breed service providers handle the complexities of your Web environment. How valid does that philosophy turn out to be when one of the specialized providers has service interruptions?

Services around the Web felt the pinch of service outsourcing this afternoon due to an internal communication problem with Amazon’s S3 and SQS services. The effects of the outage for some were purely cosmetic; Twitter failed to load user avatars for a period starting around noon Eastern time. For others like Basecamp and other 37signals products, the downtime caused features to be disabled temporarily.

The hardest hit this afternoon, though, were services whose entire system revolved around Amazon’s service. Users of SmugMug were greeted with a picture of the service logo watering a garden of servers and a brief message explaining the current situation. The company’s reaction? “We’re not happy about it, of course…”

Amazon does provide a service level agreement (SLA) for their AWS suite; any uptime of less than 99.9% of any given month results in either a 10% or 25% credit of that month’s service cost. (A 6-hour isolated outage on a 31-day month would result in a monthly uptime of 99.2%.) With the number of services that fundamentally depend on external providers for the entirety of their business, is a simple SLA valid?

As SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill wrote this afternoon on the SmugMug Status Updates blog:

Since problems in this industry are inevitable, and Amazon’s performance over the last two years has been so exceptional, we’ve been afraid an outage like this. I’m sure there will be more over the next few years, too.

While MacAskill’s point may sound pessimistic, it’s historically valid. While using best-of-breed services and APIs provides a service with a host of tangible benefits, it comes with the risk of multiple points of failure for a connected Web business.

(In 2006, MacAskill wrote a post detailing why S3 is a good choice for his business.)

As the major television news stations reported on the sudden death of one of modern times’ most respected journalists, similar coverage unfolded simultaneously online. The people participating in this new form of real-time reporting didn’t sit in anchor chairs in front of millions of viewers. Today’s online coverage was composed of 140-character messages from ordinary people in front of computers and mobile devices around the world.

Many users of Twitter found posts from their followers announcing the death of NBC political analyst Tim Russert this afternoon in their Twitterstreams. As the news spread, the Twitter crowd mentioned some of their memories of election nights, whiteboards, and episodes of “Meet the Press”. People from all over the globe put aside their political differences and remembered their favorite moments of a great reporter.

As the tweets came flowing in, a new type of memorial formed at conversational tracking sites like Summize. A search for “russert” revealed a broad compilation of announcements, emotions, and well wishes. A real-time anthology of reactions evolved as more Twitter users learned of Russert’s passing.

Maps of 100 recent Twitter users who posted about Tim Russert today. Images created with the Summize, Twittervision, and Google Maps APIs.

Now, just hours after the first announcement of Russert’s death, hundreds (if not thousands) of people around the world have joined an impromptu community and contributed to this new form of spontaneous memorial. It’s a fitting tribute for a journalist by those who watched and respected his insight.